ASUS ROG Ally X review: Hardcore hardware for handheld gaming

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For a casual gamer like me, someone who’s trying to juggle maintaining a respectable K/D ratio in Fortnite with my buddies, raise a couple kiddos and spend quality time with my wife – the ASUS ROG Ally X is a godsend. Seriously, it’s not just a handheld; it’s a full-blown mobile gaming rig with a screen built in, and the convenience of a console controller interface. 

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This portable PC isn’t some dinky little toy. It’s got the muscle to run AAA titles, and not just at barely-playable frame rates. I can actually enjoy my games on this thing. The screen looks really good, colours pop and after a bit of adjustment, the controls feel pretty good in my hands. Here’s everything that you need to know about the ASUS ROG Ally X. 

What: ASUS ROG Ally X (2024) RC72LA
Price: $1,099 CAD
Where to buy: ASUS | Best Buy

Notable impressions

ASUS ROG Ally X key features

Many people familiar with the Ally X’s predecessor, the Ally, will note that two major things haven’t changed with this refresh. Yes, the AMD Z1 extreme and the 1080P 120 Hz free-sync panel haven’t changed… but that’s it. Everything else is new and improved.

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I’m used to playing with a PS5 Dualsense controller, and I actually prefer the resistance of the joysticks on the Ally X. It’s much easier to smoothly add a little bit of direction versus slamming them all the way to one side over and over. It really feels premium. The triggers are also smooth and responsive, which I chalk up to the hall effect joystick and trigger upgrade which also adds reliability and 2.5x lifetime to these components. 

Battery

Compared to the Ally, the battery capacity of the X has been doubled to 80Wh without adding any weight; an impressive feat. In fact, the size of this battery rivals every other gaming handheld on the market at the time of writing, and in terms of what that means for real world mobile gaming usability, it more than offsets the lack of things like an OLED screen in my opinion. In my use, I was able to play some pretty resource heavy games like Forza and No Man’s Sky untethered for about 2-2.5 hours depending on settings.

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Display & audio

The display looks darn good despite not being an OLED panel. At the time of writing there aren’t many OLED gaming handheld options, but I do foresee this becoming the new standard. The 1080p touchscreen with 120hz refresh rate and 7ms response time is however on par with some gaming laptops of a much larger size. It can also hit 500 nits, which means playing outside in full sun isn’t a squint fest as the colours continue to pop. My experience with the touchscreen has been better than expected as well. It supports up to 10 points of touch detection, so multi-touch and gestures work smoothly. Given the size of some of the objects I’m tapping when using Windows, I was impressed with the accuracy I could get as I prodded away.

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The RGB lighting around the joysticks is actually pretty cool, and if you use Aura Sync, it fits right in with your patterns. I typically turn it off when gaming, but it can totally be incorporated via customization to react to in-game situations like levelling up or taking damage.

The speakers on the front of the Ally X are much louder than the Ally, and I was pretty surprised at the depth of field they could produce when playing FPS games. Don’t expect booming bass, but they let me enjoy rounds of Fortnite without feeling like I was at too much of a disadvantage.

Cooling

The Ally X has two separate fans with 77 individual blades that have been made far thinner than the previous mode which has saved enough space to fit that 2x sized battery. Also due to that thinner blade design, more air can pass through each blade, and the noise from these fans has been drastically reduced especially at lower speeds. While playing for over an hour, I barely noticed their noise when gaming without headphones, and it was inaudible when I had earbuds in. 

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The device also has what ASUS and ROG are calling ‘anti-gravity heat pipes’ that use a natural physical process borrowed from plants called capillary action to move the cooling solution toward the fans even when upside down. The fans are 23 per cent smaller, the blades are 50 per cent thinner, and they produce 10 per cent more airflow than the Ally. Combined with the two heatsinks, dust filters, 3 vents and the fluid bearings on the fans, the Ally X’s heat-beating hardware is seriously space-aged.

Storage & memory

The Ally X ships with 1TB of lightning-fast PCIe Gen 4 storage, providing ample space for games and faster boot times. The storage has been upgraded to a full-size M.2 2280 SSD so it can be easily swapped for higher capacity drives. You can open the cover to access the M.2 slot (being careful not to tear the ribbon cable that attaches to the cover), and then install a new SSD by inserting it into the slot and securing it in place with a screw. Here’s a video from Tofer.A on how to do that properly. It’ll support up to 4TB internally, and then you can add up to a 1TB SD card in the external slot bringing the total storage up to 5TB, but these SSDs get pretty pricey the larger you go.

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Sporting 24 GB of DDR5-7500 RAM for more flexibility compared to the 16GB that was available on the Ally, this pool of memory is used by both the 8 Zen4 cores and its integrated Radeon 780M GPU. As an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit), one might think that it might behave more like a jack of all trades versus as master of either one, but the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme lets you set the amount of RAM you dedicate to the CPU and the iGPU in Armoury Crate, letting you find that perfect balance of beauty and smoothness.

USB connectivity

The Ally X features two USB C ports. One USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port and one USB 4 Type-C port featuring Thunderbolt 4 compatibility. This lets you connect accessories which unlock the use of everything from external displays, to eGPUs, mice, keyboards and other peripherals to turn your Ally X into a tiny desktop PC. Both ports will support up to 100W of charging too, though the included adapter is only a 65W, which ASUS says was a decision made to balance portability with charging speed. I grabbed this 240W USB C cable and a charging block similar to this which will really boost your charging speeds.

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Macro Keys

The macro keys on the back of the Ally X have shrunk since the Ally, which is great since even these smaller ones can on occasion seem a little extra or obtrusive. That is, until I discovered this handy list of Ally X macro hotkey defaults included in some press material:

• Macro + D-pad up: Show Keyboard
• Macro + D-pad down: Task Manager
• Macro + D-pad left: Show Desktop
• Macro + D-pad right: Task Viewer
• Macro + A: Take Screenshot
• Macro + B: Show Windows Notification Center
• Macro + X: Projection mode
• Macro + Y: Begin Recording

These came in handy when trying to grab screenshots of victories or epic moments of gameplay.

Customization is at the heart of the ROG Ally X

Armoury Crate SE: Armoury Crate SE is the tailor-made solution that lets you take control of the options and power within the Ally X far beyond what Windows would allow, and in far more accessible ways. It opens by default when Windows launches, which at first was a bit annoying, but quickly became a benefit since I pretty much only use the Ally X for gaming, and AC SE now has a built-in game library for quick-launching all your titles.

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Command center: Much like the full version of AC you’d find on an ROG laptop or PC, Armoury Crate SE lets you configure and control game profiles, change the button layout, tweak the Aura sync lighting, toggle graphics settings and more. There’s also a system overlay view that lets you keep an eye on the battery level, clock speeds, temperatures and the current power draw while you’re in-game.

Game library: The built-in game library acts like a tailorable gaming-specific desktop that works cross-platform. It strives to be a gaming OS within an OS; behaving like a configurable launcher that collects and commands all of your games across different platforms, providing a more touch-friendly, accessible experience for your library.

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Game profiles: To each their own, and with game profiles you can customize the controls by remapping every button on the Ally X to suit your style and preferences. Each game can have its own profile as well, letting you tweak and save GPU settings like RSR and AFMF so each game runs the way you want it.

ASUS ROG Ally X review

The ASUS ROG Ally X has genuinely changed my gaming life for the better. It’s allowed me to embrace my casual gamer identity without sacrificing my social life or, more importantly, my relationship with my wife. It’s powerful, it’s portable and it’s a fantastic piece of kit.

There are however a few things I’d call out that could use some improvement on the next version. The grips have been enlarged by 4.5mm and improved over the Ally, but they still don’t give you that snug feel as you’re gaming. I find I have to readjust often as I play. There are some after-market options to help with this however, and I opted to pick up the dbrand Killswitch Case to help with portability when on the road as well as in-home protection from my grabby kids. 

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Another hardware gripe I have (though perhaps it’s software related?) is the glass power button that doubles as the fingerprint sensor. I was excited that this would allow me to wake and login to the Ally X quickly every time, but I found that it was terribly spotty. It’s worked maybe 10 per cent of the time, and I’ve re-mapped my finger(s) numerous times. Pick a short pin as backup because you’re going to be using it. 

I’ve also mentioned the need for adapters to get external accessories working, and this is another one of my frustration points. I have a USB C dongle that includes an HDMI port that I’ve used on other computers to get an external display going, and it didn’t work on the Ally X. 

Windows is (once again) perhaps the worst part of using an ASUS product, though perhaps a necessary evil of the inclusive gaming landscape. The one thing I’ll say about Windows 11 on the Ally X is that I was surprised to find that it’s, well… Windows 11. Full on, Windows 11. Like I’ve mentioned earlier and in other articles, I’m primarily a console gamer and a Mac user, so I was sort of astounded to realize that this gaming handheld was essentially a tiny (yet fully capable) PC. If you can stomach Windows, or are confident enough to finagle a partition with Bazzite or SteamOS installed, then this handheld device is an absolute must-have.

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What: ASUS ROG Ally X (2024) RC72LA
Price: $1,099 CAD
Where to buy: ASUS | Best Buy

ASUS ROG Ally X tech specs

Operating System: Windows 11 Home

Processor

• CPU: AMD Ryzen™ Z1 Extreme Processor (“Zen4” architecture with 4nm process, 8-core /16-threads, 24MB total cache, up to 5.10 Ghz boost)
• GPU: AMD Radeon™ Graphics (AMD RDNA™ 3, 12 CUs, up to 2.7 GHz, up to 8.6 Teraflops)

Display

• 7-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) 16:9
• IPS-level
• glossy display
• sRGB: 100%
• Adobe: 75.35%
• Gorilla® Glass Victus™
• Touch Screen (10-point multi-touch)
• Refresh Rate: 120Hz
• Response Time: 7ms
• Brightness: 500 nits
• FreeSync Premium

Memory

• 12GB*2 LPDDR5 on board
• Support dual channel memory

Storage: 1TB PCIe® 4.0 NVMe™ M.2 SSD (2280)

I/O Ports

• 1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C support DisplayPort™ / power delivery
• 1x Type C support USB 4 (Thunderbolt™ 4 compliance, DisplayPort™ 1.4 with Freesync support, Power Delivery 3.0)
• 1x UHS-II microSD card reader (supports SD, SDXC and SDHC)

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Control and Input

• A B X Y buttons
• D-pad
• L & R Hall Effect analog triggers
• L & R bumpers
• View button
• Menu button
• Command Center button
• Armoury Crate button
• 2 x assignable grip buttons
• Thumbsticks: 2 x full-size analog sticks
• Haptics: HD haptics
• Gyro: 6-Axis IMU

Audio

• AI noise-canceling technology
• Hi-Res certification (for headphone)
• Smart Amp Technology
• Dolby Atmos
• Built-in array microphone
• 2-speaker system with Smart Amplifier Technology

Battery: 80WHrs, 4S1P, 4-cell Li-ion

Power Supply

TYPE-C, 65W AC Adapter, Output: 20V DC, 3.25A, 65W, Input: 100~240V AC 50/60Hz universal

Weight: 678 g (1.49 lbs)

Dimensions (W x D x H): 28.0 x 11.1 x 2.47 ~ 3.69 cm (11.02″ x 4.37″ x 0.97″ ~ 1.45″)

Security

• Built-in Fingerprint Sensor
• Microsoft Pluton security processor

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